MAURICE MANNING‘s first book of poems, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001) was chosen by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Subsequent books include A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Lone Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004); Bucolics (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin , 2010) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Gone and the Going Away (Houghton Mifflin, 2013). He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Manning is a Professor of English at Transylvania University in Kentucky. He serves on the faculty in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the Sewanee Writing Conference. Born and raised in Kentucky, he often writes about the land and culture of his home. [read a recent article in the Kentucky Herald, for more about Maurice Manning.